Diablo III PvP Mode Still In The Works

Blizzard has been talking about its plan to update Diablo III with a competitive multiplayer mode since the game released back in May. Despite this delay, Blizzard's Player vs Player mode still isn't ready to release. What's taking so long?

In a recent blog post on Battle.net, Blizzard's Jay Wilson said, "Our original intent with PvP for Diablo III was to provide more formal support for the dueling community that existed in Diablo II. We wanted to give players some kind of structure that would not only make it easier for you to duel with one another, but also allow you to have duels that were team-based. This is how our Team Deathmatch mode emerged, and it's been instrumental in making a lot of improvements to Diablo III. But in continuing to develop this mode, playtest it, and put it in front of other developers within the company, we've found that it falls short of our expectations for a high-quality Blizzard experience."

Wilson went on to add, "Simply fighting each other with no other objectives or choices to make gets old relatively quickly. We've brought a lot of people in to try out Team Deathmatch and, while some found it entertaining, most of our testers didn't feel like it was something they'd want to do beyond a few hours. Without more varied objectives, or very lucrative rewards, few saw our current iteration as something they'd want spend a lot of time in."

Wilson also talked about the challenge of balancing the classes against each other, but mentioned that dueling would be added in patch 1.0.7, which is set to release sometime after the new year. Unfortunately, the development team is going back to the drawing board for Team Deathmatch, so we might have to wait a bit longer for that one. Knowing Blizzard...quite a bit longer.